TV

Insurance business recently presented IB FutureFest, the world's largest insurance festival. A host of industry experts were on site and we caught up with them to ask what is the next big innovation in insurance.

Solving for climate change is the next big innovation. Actually being able to anticipate from a resiliency perspective how we can respond better. You know, we just had the tragedy in Texas in Kur Texas with the flooding um and we lost lives and then we just had flooding I believe in New Mexico and there's not enough uh proactivity from the insurance industry around how we can better prepare and anticipate and also partnership with public private entities like counties and cities and states and the federal government so that we respond in a way that's connected and and everyone's welled. formed and then also educating the communities where people live. So the next big innovation really is collaboration and community.

Well, we're in the middle of it, right? Artificial intelligence is part of a broader innovation of of automation. And so that's why I say like AI is a tool. It's not the only tool. It's not the multi-tool. There's a lot of problems we can solve in in insurance uh with with other tools other than AI. But I would say that automation in general is a is a big big winner in insurance because it allows us as an industry to focus on people. Remember people buy insurance whether they work for a company or they're buying for themselves and they like to in general talk to other people and be consulted on the risk. If you look at like the role of a broker or the role of a business developer in a carrier or the role of a business developer at a TPA, all of them really should be risk consultants. if they have the time and if they're not doing the boring menial manual stuff. And so I think that's that's really the next big innovation is is automation technology that allows us to because remember this is an industry of paper, right? I mean insurance policies are contracts. The the industry is run by lawyers. There's a lot of documents. There's a lot of paper. There's a lot of of of pushing and pulling data around in Excel spreadsheets. And so I think the real big innovation we're right in the middle of and that's how do we take all this stuff and and and have have machines do the part that we don't like doing so we can get back to the basics of humanto human interaction and serving as risk consultants.

A great broker is a great risk consultant. A great carrier is a great risk consultant. If you actually help people, you know, reduce and mitigate risk, you're doing your job. And but you only do that if you have the headsp space and the time to do it. Which is why I think what like like what artificial intelligence is doing with document summaries. Just document summaries. Your average claims adjuster on anyone who deals with any kind of medical health records on claims. So whether it's a work comp claim or there's a bodily injury claim, they have to manually summarize hundreds of pages of medical records into their notes on their claim file. that process. If you eliminate that and let AI do the summary, that can save hundreds of hours a day across an entire organization and allow them to spend more time on the phone talking to claimants. That that benefits everybody. So, I think that's why we're in the middle of the next big innovation is leveraging automation technology and really leveraging the really simple stuff that I that AI can do. We don't need AI to be the broker. We don't need AI to be the business developer. If they can just summarize documents for us, we're winning big time. But you'd be surprised how many companies still have not adopted this even though the adoption time is weeks, not months. So I think most people at the conference will probably have said AI and I absolutely agree with that. You can't ignore AI being a really big part of this market going forward.

Yeah, it's uh things are happening fast and furious on the on the artificial intelligence side. I think um one thing I just spoke about in and the panel I was on was how AI is being used in in uh not just assessing climate risk and using all the data that's available the big data uh and the big compute resources that are required to do something with that uh but also using it in our tools and our models like spatial spatial intelligence is coming a long way. So using that to get out to lossa affected areas earlier to communicate with our uh policyh holders in a in a in a quicker way uh to uh identify risk issues you know before the loss even happens. Um you know identifying issues with roofs for instance these models uh take a long time to kind of train and and uh there's takes a lot of um underwriter input to make sure that these models are operating effectively uh both uh uh pre-loss and post-loss. But it's it's getting pretty cool and interesting out there.

The next big innovation in insurance is AI agents that are going to allow us to do new perform numerous tasks such as creating policy forms, reviewing compliance documents. All of these AI agents coming together creating a hub, an AILE hub that gives us the ability to have really smart starting points, frees up time for all of the insurance professionals to focus more on more important things. innovation, cuttingedge development of tools and technologies rather than more of the mundane task that we are all getting tied down with right now.

Oh man, everything is AI related right now and that's the big buzz. That's everything talking about. So it's just a matter of figuring out the race of who's going to figure out first like the best way of using it and how to do it. And so I think that you know once those people figure that out and there's so many different use cases for AI or generative AI or whatever it might be I think that's going to be the next phase of that and you know you'll see AI agents you'll see AI staff you'll see people managing so I think the next innovation you'll see carriers agencies companies hiring people that'll be AI managers or like AI content managers or whatever it might be and managing the AI know the next big innovation it's kind of interesting we are an insurance.

So I'll use an insurance word somewhat. But if you think about agenic AI, I think is a really cool innovation that's being applied in use cases and insurance and beyond. But if you think about insurance agents, they're really that extension of an insurance company to reach out into the market and create that unique customer experience. If you think about agenic AI in the same way, it's how are externally you're creating that unique personalized customer experience and internally within a insurance company, it's providing additional really arms and virtual legs to help with workflow um for analytics, you know, to really get processes done. Um so I'd say agenic AI I mean it's it's been a buzzword for about the last six months but I really think it has the opportunity to transform insurance both internally um with workflow and then externally with that customer experience and that distribution uh journey for me I think the biggest thing that insurance uh needs today is more data inputs data is highly important for um you know making the process much more streamlined, easier, much more effective at the end of the Okay.

And uh so any kind of data insights you can get or you can glean uh that is highly important. I think the easy answer would be you know artificial intelligence offers an opportunity for us to let people do what they're good at and not focus on administration. So that's maybe the the easy answer. I would say the innovation opportunity is as an industry we can lead. We can lead and attract talent by the things that we do and the the stories that we tell and the promises we keep. And that's what I would challenge the industry to focus on is let's lead and get people to come into this industry that otherwise wouldn't.

Um, you know, I think just like I'm sure you guys have already heard, I think the main thing that revolves around uh AI and how AI will impact us. Um, I think there's positives and negatives to it. The upside is just uh streamlining some of the processes um and just um providing uh you know just quicker you know data points and gathering of data um you know compiling that data and then using it. I just think the main thing is that we have to stay actively involved uh with AI. You can't have AI making decisions um for underwriting or for you know claims uh or or the the aspects outside of just uh you know data population um and and just being able to to use it to streamline and and more quickly process information.

I think we all know it's AI. Um, AI is going to change our industry in a multitude of ways. Uh, you know, when you talk about these situations where we work with client service teams that are abroad, we might start seeing those client service teams transition over to artificial intelligence in ways where they're, you know, issuing our policies for us, taking care of um, endorsements for us. And then, you know, even when it comes to aggregating data and things like that, you know, certainly artificial intelligence is going to help us do our jobs better. In a lot of ways, the next bit innovation, well, we've talked a lot about it in the last two days here at IB FutureFest, and that's that's AI and how to integrate AI so that we can upskill our own colleagues so that they're not doing mundane tasks that they're actually interacting with clients and meeting the needs of what they need to have instead of doing paperwork behind a desk.

Yeah. Broadly, I would say, you know, it's probably what's on everyone's mind. AI, uh, you know, how do we incorporate it into the workflows? Uh, become more efficient. It's both interesting and scary at the same time. It could take over our jobs. I think specifically for us in insurance, it means uh, we'll be able to spend more facetime with our broker partners. So, we uh, we're excited about it.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of talk about AI here, right? Uh, so I think we're seeing a lot of ways that it's a new tool, if you will, but that it's going to be used and can really change how things are used. It doesn't necessarily replace bodies and seats, but but it gives them other ways to look at things and will allow the development of other kinds of products and services. So, I think that's kind of shift, if you will, and like um like a business shift all the way because all the companies that we work with are going to be doing that too. So that's going to kind of change how things are done and how things are looked at in in the future.

I think the next big innovation in insurance could be twofold because on one hand we have AI popping up everywhere. On the other hand we kind of have a bit of an institutional industry where change can be slowed to happen but the reality is it is happening. changes happening across the industry especially in the ENS lines and property casualty side and it's really an opportunity to be in the industry at the moment. I think the key buzz word for that is everyone loves the term AI. I think the curiosity is what does that hold for the industry and where is that going to take us? [Music]